Friday, January 29, 2021

All In One John Tasioulas

Human rights, health, the rule of law – why are these concepts inflated to the status of totalising, secular religions?
18th century liberalism raised to the status of revealed religion.

Conceptual overreach
One prominent form taken by this degradation of public reason is the phenomenon I call ‘conceptual overreach’. This occurs when a particular concept undergoes a process of expansion or inflation in which it absorbs ideas and demands that are foreign to it. In its most extreme manifestation, conceptual overreach morphs into a totalising ‘all in one’ dogma. A single concept – say, human rights or the rule of law – is taken to offer a comprehensive political ideology, as opposed to picking out one among many elements upon which our political thinking needs to draw and hold in balance when arriving at justified responses to the problems of our time. Of course, we’ll always need some very general concepts to refer to vast domains of value – the ideas of ethics, justice and morality, for example, have traditionally served this function. The problem is when there is a systematic trend for more specific concepts of value to aspire to the same level of generality....


This kind of thinking leads to the many paradoxes of liberalism that often make "liberalism" illiberal. The fundamental notion of liberalism is toleration and not imposition.

Aeon
All In One
John Tasioulas | professor of ethics and legal philosophy and director of the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford

4 comments:

Peter Pan said...

The Swiss army knife of philosophies?
Does everything poorly.

Matt Franko said...

“ Think, for example, of a tax law that unjustly burdens the poor, but is nonetheless published in advance, set out clearly and accessibly, and enforced by officials according to its meaning – thus meeting the requirements of the rule of law. The injustice might even be so great that disobedience on the part of the poor would be warranted.”

Guaranteed this guy thinks “money” is real and govt has to get “it” from taxpayers.... making the typical reification error these dumb people are always making and doesn’t even realize it.. guaranteed...

Andrew Anderson said...

and govt has to get “it” from taxpayers. Franko

In the case of non-monetarily sovereign governments that might be true (exception: revenue sharing from the monetary sovereign).

And note that MMT proposes to use taxation to curb price inflation rather than interest rates.

Matt Franko said...

No they don’t .... “money” is a figure of speech... all they have to do is fix the exchange/conversion ratio of the two numismatic units at 1:1 and issue...

Instead they fix the regulatory capital of the Depositories and then ofc have to adjust the conversion ratio of the external currency assets...

It’s not “floating!” that is ANOTHER figure of speech...

Try not using futures of speech all the time like normal (STEM) people...